i am looking at one of poach's january journal entries about thesis discouragements and thinking about her use of the birthing metaphor for literary production which is not one that i ever took to. i mean, it must be so much easier to be a man. remember written on the body? ("is it true that rembrandt painted with his penis?" "of course, when he died they found a paintbrush between his legs") poach, frustrated by the long and difficult term, wanted hers to be a premature birth. mine's definitely not premature and right now i know a caesarian is just about the only way anyone can drag the damn thing out of me. (oh why did i have to say caesarian! now i have to think about macduff being untimely ripped, and my scottish riddle source! argh!) if i had some intensity or purpose, like poach, to think nonstop about my work and to think hard on my books, i would be much better off, but what i do is to try my best to avoid thinking about the project, and drift around from book to book enjoying finding new ideas and happily musing on them without sitting down to make anything come of them. so that if we have to stick with birthing metaphors then i am pretty unhappily sure that mine will be stillborn unless someone does something drastic to me. i also feel a little bit like eddie the philosopher in the thought gang, who had been receiving advances on his new book for two years without penning a single syllable, and who finally had to be kidnapped by his editor, chained up, and forced to write, although i don't suppose anyone will want to kidnap me and then write my essay for me (which is what his very angry publisher did in the end, when even kidnap and starvation didn't produce more than a few badly scratched pages.) oh i know, with me, laziness is definitely the key, not just the disabling multiplicity of possibilities, although the latter is very bad too.